Asunción

I've been in Asunción for the past two days, having arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning after a full day's travel from Campo Grande. I crossed into Paraguay at Ponta Porã/Pedro Juan Caballero, which must be the most traveller-unfriendly border crossing that I've ever seen. The two bus stations and two immigration offices were all in completely separate places, which meant that I had to pay a taxi driver R$40 (£15) to drive me between these four different locations. That's roughly double the cost of the subsequent 8-hour bus journey to Asunción.

I arrived in Asunción at about 1:30am, and I ended up staying in an expensive hotel that the taxi driver suggested, after the hotel I originally asked him to take me to was full. However, because I arrived so late, and I think because I had a bit of a moan about the price, the receptionist said that I could stay until Sunday and pay for only one night, which made it not so expensive after all. Nevertheless it did mean that I was stuck in a slightly depressing 3-star hotel for two nights, which wasn't what I'd planned. Today (Sunday) I moved to Black Cat Hostel, which is Asunción's only proper backpackers hostel.

After not a lot of sleep, I spent Saturday morning seeing the sights of the city centre. I started at what is probably Asunción's most famous building, the Panteón de los Héroes, which contains the remains of Paraguay's leaders that were killed in the War of the Triple Alliance, which also killed most of Paraguay's male population in the 1860s. I then walked to the Casa de la Independencia, which is the house in which independence was declared from Spain in 1811. I also went to see the Palacio de Gobierno (below), which I understand in Paraguay's early days I would have been shot for looking at.

Near the Palacio de Gobierno are the Plaza de Armas and the Cabildo, which is the former seat of the government. And just one block north of the Cabildo, towards the Rio Paraguay, is a shanty town, which I didn't really expect to see so close to Asunción's historic buildings. There were also squatters sleeping outside my hotel in Plaza Uruguaya, which is one of Asunción's main squares, so there's clearly a lot of poverty in this city.

In the afternoon I decided to visit Asunción's botanical gardens, which are about a half-hour bus ride outside town. To be honest I wasn't all that bothered about going to the gardens; I was actually more interested in seeing the remains of the Ycuá Bolaños supermarket, which the bus passed on the way. Nearly 400 people burnt to death in this building in 2004 after a fire started in the kitchen, and the owner instructed security guards to lock the doors to stop people leaving the store with goods they hadn't paid for (see the news story here). I also visited the small shrine next to the supermarket.

On Sundays the centre of Asunción is deserted and everything is shut, so I didn't do a great deal today. I thought it was a good idea to get out of town, and I did actually try to go to Areguá, which is a city about 30km east of Asunción. My heart clearly wasn't in it though, because when the bus finally turned up after I'd waited for nearly an hour, and it drove straight past me without stopping, I just gave up and went back to the hostel, and spent the rest of the day reading and studying a bit of Spanish.

Overall I don't think I'll remember Asunción as one of my favourite cities, but it hasn't been as bad as I expected. It's a bit of a weird place, and there's not a lot to do in the city centre at least, although apparently if you go to the rich suburbs in the east, there are as many smart restaurants, nightclubs and shopping centres as you could possibly want. Obviously I didn't see any of that side of the city though.

Tomorrow I'm heading to Ciudad del Este, which is on the Paraguay side of the three-way border with Brazil and Argentina, and is near to the location of the Itaipu Dam and Iguazu Falls.